Posts

John Homenuk

3.23 LR/AG: Active pattern with multiple severe weather chances

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A happy Thursday evening to you all! We hope you’ve had a wonderful day and are sitting down to read and chat with us regarding the upcoming long range weather pattern. We’ve got a lot to cover and will do our best to lay it out in an understandable and explanatory format. For a few weeks now, our forecasters have been discussing a change to the atmospheric pattern across the Northern Hemisphere during the end of March. These changes are still likely to occur and will lead to a much different weather pattern than the one we’ve been observing over the past few weeks.

From early March up until today, the pattern over the Northern Hemisphere has been essentially altered by the presence of high latitude blocking. This is better defined as the presence of ridging, or “blocking” high pressures in the atmosphere across parts of Canada, Greenland, and the Arctic. These are critically important because they alter the atmospheric flow in those regions and dislodge cold air, usually bottled up north, further south into the USA. The presence of this blocking has resulted in a colder pattern, particularly across the Northeast, in March.

Things are about to change.

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John Homenuk

Long Range: Pacific Ocean, stratosphere hold the keys to the pattern

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The winter season, thus far has been characterized mainly by transition. No real consistency has developed in the weather pattern, both throughout the Pacific Ocean and the United States. Much of this can be attributed to tropical forcing and the state of the Pacific Ocean itself, which has remained largely in flux over the past several months. Every time it appears a pattern will settle in, some sort of retrograde or reversal occurs — before another train of disturbance arrives from the Western Pacific and changes things yet again.

Yet, here we are, more than halfway through the winter, at what seems to be a breaking point of sorts. The atmosphere, from the troposphere to the stratosphere, is about to undergo some significant changes, most of which will have a large impact on the weather we experience here across the lower 48. Much of this begins in the Pacific Ocean (Again) where the pattern is going to change once again — and ends in the stratosphere, where the large polar vortex is going to be significantly disrupted.

The sensible weather results throughout the lower 48 currently remain uncertain. But there are some clues to be found in the medium and long range forecast models. There are also clues to be found away from model guidance — not everything comes directly from them, after all. We can look to past events as well as basic synoptic meteorology to begin to understand how the pattern will evolve through February and beyond.

We break down what’s going on in our latest video: